All posts for the month February, 2016

Hello everybody! The last post I posted was about the Game Prince RS-1, and this post is about it, too!

That post I’m referring to was posted at like 9:00 PM, which means that I was tired, so I didn’t get a chance to write about everything on this portable famiclone. But whatever, I’m writing about it now! You’ll get to hear everything I want to say about it!

Anyway, one thing I didn’t mention last time was the screen cover. When you get a brand new copy of the Game Prince, it has a screen cover on it. The screen cover on mine had something scribbled on it in marker, and it had a little sticker intended for pulling it off. Some guy on the internet said that you should keep the Game Prince turned off when you take off the screen cover, so I figured I should tell you that.

After you pull off the screen cover, then it’s easier to see the screen. I definitely recommend taking off the screen cover. There’s really no point in putting it back on, though. I don’t even know how you would put it back on.

Moving on, there are a few minor complaints about the Game Prince. First off, the button layout is wrong. A is on the left and B is on the right. Original NES/Famicom controllers had B on the left and A on the right. This can be a little annoying when you first play it, but it’s easy to get used to.

The second complaint is that they have a turbo button for A, but not a turbo button for B. That is dumb. If you’re going to have cheat-mode turbo buttons, you’d obviously pick B, which is used for most actions. But no, they picked A. Whatever, that’s not very important anyway, and I don’t care.

Next is the lack of a headphone jack. They put a connector on there for connecting it to the TV, but they didn’t put a headphone jack. So if you are playing Angry Birds or Plants Vs. Zombies on this thing and somebody says “put on your headphones!” then you’ll say “I can’t! It doesn’t have a headphone jack!” and then they’ll say “well then, turn the volume off!” Oh well.

But despite all of that, the Game Prince is pretty good. I don’t really care about any of the above-mentioned concerns very much, so whatever. There is a problem with it that is much more important.

It doesn’t have a select button. WHAATT???? How do I pick the level editor mode in Tank A 1990? How do I pick Game B in Donkey Kong? How do I pick Game B in Circus Charlie? How do I pick Game B in Pinball? There are lots of things you can’t do without the select button. I think they took out the select button so that you can’t pick 2-player mode, but still.

I also forgot to mention last time that Angry Birds and Plants Vs. Zombies on the Famicom were developed by NiceCode Software.

NiceCode Software’s logo.

Moving on to some of the other included unlicensed games. First off is Street Fighter VI: 12 Peoples.

Remember this? If so, maybe it’s because I wrote about it a while back. You can check out my post about it here. The point is though, it’s an unlicensed Street Fighter port.

Next off is Maze Tussle, which is a hack of the Japanese version of Pac-Man.

This hack modifies the music, and it replaces most of the graphics. Kinda interesting. The pictures above basically show everything.

Next off is Crypt Car, a hack of Dig Dug. It modifies some of the music and replaces some of the graphics. Now Dig Dug is replaced with a tank that shoots short-ranged bullets, and some of the bad guys are replaced with spinies (the Mario bad guy).

Next of is Aladdin III. (Not related to Hummer Team’s game of the same name.) This Aladdin III is a hack of the unlicensed game Magic Carpet 1001. I mentioned it in my summary of the CoolBoy 400-in-1 multicart, so maybe it’ll look familiar.

Unlike the CoolBoy 400-in-1 version though, this one has a title screen!

Anyway, this game is an unlicensed shoot-’em-up where you are a guy on a magic carpet in a desert and you have to use a bow and your unlimited supply of arrows to attack all the birds, bees, evil sorcerers, etc. It doesn’t have a score though. Weird.

Moving on, there’s Magic Jewelry. That’s an unlicensed puzzle game very similar to Columns.

Neat. Next off are some Battle City hacks. I really should do a whole post on this some time, but there was a company called Yanshan Software that made hacked NES games. They had a really big series go battle city hacks. The Yanshan Software battle city hacks that are on this system are:

Tank A 1990

Tank B 1990

Tank C 1990

Tank D 1990

Tank E 1990

Yeah, I have like 7 of Yanshan Software’s battle city hacks. I’ve already written about one, Tank A 1990, but I still have like 6 to write about. Stay tuned!

Lastly, there’s Tengen’s version of Tetris. They changed the title screen to look like this, though:

Hm. That looks familiar. That’s because it is. A while back, we saw a hack of Tengen’s Tetris that made the title screen look like this:

Tetris II title screen

Hmm. I guess we have a title screen hack of a title screen hack of an unlicensed game. In case you’re wondering, the original title screen looked like this before it got hacked:

That’s it for now, guys. If I notice anything else interesting on here, I’ll make a part 3. That’s probably not going to happen, though. Bye! I’ll write more later.

There’s the controls and the screen. It also looks kinda like the Game Boy Micro, which was a version of the Game Boy Advance.

The Game Prince also comes in different colors, like green, black, orange, silver, red, and gold. Maybe there’s more, but I dunno.

Anyway, let’s look at the Game Prince system from other angles to see what it looks like.

There’s the battery cover, where you put in the necessary 3 AAA batteries.

Here’s the power switch and a little port on the side. Is that a headphone jack? No! I’ll get to that in a minute.

Nothing on this side.

A volume adjustor.

Nothing on this side.

Hm. No cartridge slot. But whatever, it has games built in.

Moving on, it’s got this manual:

It has a picture of the Game Prince playing New Super Mario Bros., but that’s a lie. It can’t actually do that. It’s lying. Here’s the rest of the manual:

If you read the manual (I suspect you didn’t) you’d have noticed several grammatical, punctuational, and spelling errors. Whatever though. What else is in the box?

Just one more thing. The AV cable. You were wondering what that port in the system was, it’s for plugging the Game Prince into your TV.

Yes, you can plug the handheld into your TV and use it as a plug and play system.

But there is a very big complaint about TV mode though: the cable is very, very short. I mean, look at this:

Because of this, most of these screenshots are probably going to be taken from handheld mode, since it’s easier to get pictures of.

If you power it up, you’ll get this:

It looks like that, and it has some music playing in the background.

As you can see, this looks kinda like Super Mario Bros. Yeah, most of the graphics in that picture are palette-swapped versions of Super Mario Bros. graphics. But not entirely. There’s that pink cat wearing a cape in the castle. There’s also a picture of somebody flying. And there’s some text: “152 in 1” and “Please prass the start key.” Yes, they made a typo there.

I should probably mention this, though. There are at least two versions of the Game Prince. The first version (and from what I can tell, the more common one) is nearly identical to this one, except that there is also a little menu that lets you choose between English and Chinese. The second version, which is what I have, removes this menu and is always in English.

Anyway though, what happens when you “prass” the start button? This:

It’s a multicart! It’s got a lot of games, but not quite 152. Some of the games are repeats. Not a lot though. Here’s a list of the games:

Contra 1 (hacked version that lets you pick what level you start on or what gun you use)

Super Mario Bros.

Teenage Mutant Ninja TurtlesTournament Fighters

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers

Blood Fight (The title screen is in Japanese so I can’t verify the name)

MAN that took forever to type. I couldn’t find any lists to plagiarize on the internet, so I was forced to boot up every game individually and test it out. GAAHHH!!! Hey viewers, next time I get a multicart, do me a favor and do all this work for me so that I can plagiarize you, please!!! AHHHH!!!!!

Moving on. In the multicart, it has a little image in the top right corner with a picture of the game you’re going to play. Pretty handy! Also, it has some pictures of vases and windows. Weird. Moving on again.

This thing has a ton of hacks and pirate games. My hands are really, really tired from typing that big long list, so I won’t write about all of them on this post. I will write about them in part 2 though. In this post, I’m going to write about the two most interesting games on here. Remember how the box said “iPhone PC Android Games”? Well. Here’s why. Here are the two games:

Well, these aren’t just boring hacks of other games that replace the graphics with Angry Birds graphics, these are actual ports. Even crazier!

I’m going to start off with Angry Birds, since it’s the more disappointing one. You already saw the title screen, so I’m not going to put it here again. If you press start, you get this:

Then you go through the menus and pick the first level, as it’s the only one unlocked. Then you are shown the slingshot with the birds and the pigs’ fortress. Then you use up and down on the d-pad to pick one of 5 different angles to shoot the bird. With only 5 angles, and only one kind of bird, the normal red ones, this port is very easy, and very boring. It has some music in it, too, that is entirely original and not related to angry birds. I actually think the music, but everybody I’ve shown the game to absolutely hates the music. Oh well.

Moving on to the much more fun plants vs. zombies port. Before I go any further, I should warn you that this game has the exact same music that is generally considered to be terrible. Moving on.

When you press start, you get taken to the first round. You have your list of plantable plants at the top of the screen, and your sun counter at the top left, and the shovel at the top right. Just like the original game. It also has a cursor. Since the NES doesn’t have a mouse, the cursor is moved with the d-pad. You click by pressing A.

When you have enough sone, you click on a plant from the menu and then click the ground to put it there. This uses up sun, but the plant goes there. You can dig plants up by using the shovel. When sun appear, click on them and your sun counter will go up by 25. Zombies will come from the right of the screen, and you have to defeat them before they get to your house and eat your brains. If a zombie gets to a plant, then it will eat it if it isn’t killed in time. Sometimes the zombies have buckets or road cones on their heads that make them stronger. That’s basically it.

Here’s what the different plants do:

•Peashooter It shoots peas across the screens and hurts the zombies.

•Sunflower It makes more sun for you so that you can grow more plants. You should plant them on the left, since they can’t attack and they are important to get you more sun.

•Repeater Same as the Peashooter, except that it fires peas twice as fast.

•Wall-nut It doesn’t attack, but it takes a long time for the zombies to eat. It can be used to make a protective wall for your other plants.

•Squash It stays in one place, and when a zombie gets close, the squash jumps in the air and squashes it. The squash is single-use, though. Keep that in mind.

•Potato Mine It’s a potato, but it’s also a bomb. When a zombie gets close, it will blow up, destroying the zombie and itself. It’s single-use. Functionally, it’s identical to the squash. It’s cheaper, so you’ll basically never use the squash. In the original game, it took a minute for the potato mines to become active, which is why they cost less sun. They didn’t do that in this port, though.

That’s it for now, guys. Bye! I’ll write more later. Like I said, there are more bootleg games on this famiclone. I’ll write about those in part 2.

Hello, guys, today I am going to tell you about an unlicensed NES game called War of Strike Mouse. It was developed by Hummer Team, the same developer that made Somari and Aladdin III.

War of Strike Mouse? What the heck kind of game is that? Well, I’m here to tell you! Push start and you get this menu telling you with three options. “easy,” “normal,” and “hard.”

Select your mode and you go to the character select screen, where you pick your character.

Then you get to the game. Your character is in the middle of the screen holding a hammer, and there a bunch of rodent burrows on all sides.

Here’s how you play. At random, rodents pop out of the burrows, and you’re supposed to hit them with a hammer. You throw a hammer by pointing the direction you want to shoot it on the d-pad. I guess you have an infinite number of hammers or something, because you don’t go retrieve the hammer after you throw it. I also guess the hammers are all disposable because all the hammers disappear after they hit a rodent, or, if you miss, the ground.

Anyway, you try to hit as many rodents as you can with your hammers before all the rodents stop coming out of the burrows, at which point you’ll get this screen summarizing how well you played. That’s it. The point of the game is to miss as few rodents as possible.

Also, at any point you can quit by pressing start. Then it will skip all the rest of the rodents and give you your score.

Also, if you waste time not doing anything while the rodents are not getting hit, then your character will start tossing a hammer in the air and catching it over and over again, as if to say “ha ha look at me I’m missing like literally ALL THE RODENTS ha ha noob!!”

That’s it for War of Strike Mouse I guess. I’ll write more on my blog later.

Hey guys! What’s up? Today I’m going to write the third and probably final post about the Vs. Maxx Maxxplay.

Yeah, I said I was going to write about the player 2 controller when it came in the mail. It came in the mail a few days ago, but I didn’t write about it that day or the next few days because I was trying to fix my Power Joy famiclone. But whatever, I’m writing about it now, so don’t complain.

Anyway, the player 2 controller looks basically the same as the main unit.

There are only a few minor differences. The reset button is still present on the player 2 controller, but it isn’t actually a button anymore. Now it’s just a little piece of plastic that doesn’t do anything.

And now for the back of the controller:

It’s basically the same, except the cartridge slot is removed. They didn’t really do a good job at removing it, though, since you can clearly see where the cartridge slot originally was.

It’s also got a light gun, too, but I’m not actually sure if it’s a player 2 lightgun. I didn’t think that there were 2-player famicom lightgun games, but I’m too lazy to go and check if it works or not.

Speaking of the lightgun, there’s something I wanted to say about it. Previously I had thought that when Jungletac had just taken out the LED when they copied the Power Joy, but apparently they just moved it. It turns out that there are a couple faint red LEDs on both sides of the lightgun. These are present on both controllers.

Unfortunately, my player 2 controller doesn’t work properly. The joystick is messed up on it and it thinks you are holding right on the joystick when you aren’t actually aren’t even using the joystick. That means I have to use the joystick to use it, which is annoying since I prefer to use the D-pad. Oh well. Guess I just wasted $7, huh?

Oh, also! You can use the player 2 controller on a Power Joy, too! So now I can play the Power Joy 2-player! I mean, there are player 2 Power Joy controllers, but I don’t have any.

The connectors for the player 2 controller are actually copies of Atari 2600 controller slots. What?? Can you use the player 2 controller on an Atari, and Atari controllers on the Maxxplay??? Well, no. While the connectors are the same, they are mapped differently, and I’ve read that it can mess up your Maxxplay, Atari 2600 system, and Atari 2600 controller all at the same time. You don’t want that, do you?

Hey guys! What’s up? Today I’m going to talk about my Power Joy plug and play, which recently stopped working. Fortunately I was able to fix it! Here’s how I did that.

Basically, the the batteries go in the back, and they are held on by the battery cover. Some battery covers can just be taken off, and the device will keep working. That’s because those battery covers just cover up the battery, and the thing will keep working if the battery cover is taken off.

Unfortunately, the Power Joy doesn’t work that way. The way it works is the battery cover has some metal glued onto it, which connects the batteries together and makes the thing work. If you take out the battery cover, it won’t power on.

This is pretty unfortunate, since these battery covers are thin and made out of cheap plastic. Thin things made out of cheap plastic are prone to breaking, so I guess it’s not really a big surprise that a piece of my Power Joy’s battery cover broke off.

If that happens, you can’t use your Power Joy with batteries. I mean, Power Joys do have a connector where you can power your Power Joy from a wall outlet, but I don’t have one of those. What I do have though is some superglue, which was what I tried to use to reattach the piece of battery cover to the rest of it.

Unfortunately, it didn’t fit very well into the Power Joy anymore, and the piece broke back off again after a while.

What to do now? Well, all the battery cover really does electronics-wise is it connects the ends of the batteries with metal. I did a little testing and it turns out you can do the same thing with little pieces of tinfoil. So what I did is I glued tinfoil to a little piece of transparent plastic.

Unfortunately, the tinfoil just fell off after the glue dried, and even if I could keep it on, it turns out to be really tricky to hold the tinfoil in place with one hand and play the game with the other.

So then I came up with a plan that actually worked. I took the original battery cover and taped it on to the Power Joy.

Last time I went over most of what the system looks like, what the controls are, and some of the games were. But I didn’t write about everything.

First off, I’m going the complain about the VERY poorly built cartridge slot on the back.

They shaped it so that most cartridges won’t even fit. If you have an official cartridge, then it’s not going to fit. It’s just going to fall out. Most of my pirate cartridges won’t fit into it either. I was only able to get four of my cartridges to run in it:

It’s SUPER ANNOYING. So for the most part, you’ll be stuck playing just the games built into the system. I mean, you could play hundreds of games using those multicarts that work, but still.

[UPDATE] I actually made a mistake there, actually I wasn’t able to get the 198-in-1 multicart to run. Just ignore that cartridge and pretend I said 3 games.

The built-in multicart has a bunch of hacks, mostly made by a developer called Inventor. (Inventor also happens to be the same company that made Pandamar). I went over some of them last time, but I didn’t go over all of them, so I’ll write about more of them now.

First off is Future Copter.

It’s a hack of Battle City where all the music and levels are changed. Also all the tanks are replaced with helicopters. I suspect that it was made by Yanshan Software, the same company that made some other similar Battle City hacks, but I don’t know for sure.

The next hack is called FrogLand.

What’s that?? An ant? I though this was called Frog Land!

Oh, I see now. Yeah, this is a hack of Donkey Kong 3 where most of the graphics are changed, Stanley the bugman is replaced with a frog, and Donkey Kong is replaced with a giant ant.

Moving on, we have Flip Out.

It’s a hack of Pinball, where everything is replaced with elves, jellyfish, kittens in eggs, turtles, etc. Weird.

Next off is Rescue.

It’s a hack of Donkey Kong Jr. All the graphics and stuff are changed and now it looks like this. Donkey Kong is replaced with a monkey wearing a red hat, Mario is replaced with a weird blue guy, and Donkey Kong Jr. is replaced with a guy wearing a mask.

Next is UFO shoot.

That’s weird. The menu select screen said “UFO Shoot” and the title screen says “UFO Shoot.” But anyway, it’s a hack of Duck Hunt where you shoot UFOs.

I’ll write about more of these hacks in part 3. That’s it for now, though. Bye!

Hey guys! I’ve gone and got a third famiclone: The Vs. Maxx™ Maxxplay.

I actually got a super good deal on it, too! It was just $8. The seller thought it was just a replacement controller, and they didn’t know what it went to.

They were wrong.

It’s ACTUALLY a plug-and-play. Yup! Another plug-and-play. Very similar to the Power Joy.

Yeah, I don’t know if the Maxxplay was copying the Power Joy or if the Power Joy was copying the Maxxplay. There are actually a ton of N64 controller-shaped famiclones, and I don’t know which one came first. MOVING ON.

It was published by a company called JungleTac, who also published several other plug-and-play systems.

Before we turn it on, let’s look at some of the details of the system. The button layout is basically exactly the same as the Power Joy, including the fully-functional joystick and light gun trigger that’s on the back:

It has a slot for a player 2 controller and cartridge slot (which isn’t very good, but more on that in part 2). The thing runs on 4 AAA batteries, just like the Power Joy does. But it’s a little different. The Power Joy let you just put in the batteries and attach the battery cover. But the way the Maxxplay works is you have to put the batteries in the “battery box,” and then put the battery box into the Maxxplay. It pops right out from the back, where the memory card/rumble pack would go on an actual N64 controller:

So let’s take a closer look at the battery pack:

To put in the batteries, you have to undo two tiny screws and then pop off the cover:

Then you have to put it back into the Maxxplay and it will run fine. But be careful the batteries you use aren’t dead. When I first did this, I thought it was broken, but the batteries were just dead. Then I had to take out the battery box, unscrew it, find four AAA batteries put them in, screw the battery box back together, put it in the Maxxplay, and then it would work. That’s a lot more work than replacing batteries on the Power Joy, but moving on.

Now let’s turn it on. The AV cables are hardwired, so you don’t have to go find any. When you turn it on, you’ll get this:

And when you press start, you’ll get this:

And when you press start again, you get this:

Yup. It’s got a built in multicart.

I haven’t played everything on it, so I can’t tell you what all the games are. But I can plagiarize some guy on the internet to get a list of the games. (I have corrected some mistakes they made.) Here it is:

There’s some interesting stuff on this multicart, so let’s go over some of it.

First off, there’s Funclick. Remember Pokémon 4-in-1? Well, if you don’t, you might want to go to that link and read about it, but the important part is that one of the games on that 4-in-1 was a pirate original called Picaclick, which was similar to SameGame (I haven’t played SameGame, but some other people on the internet say its pretty much the same). Some company hacked that game and called it Funclick. At the time I didn’t have Funclick, so I couldn’t write about it. But I have it now! Now you can see it.

Yeah, the main thing changed is that Pikachu is replaced with whoever that guy on the title screen is supposed to be. In some of his animations, he’s juggling, so I guess he’s a juggler. All the items on the screen are also changed.

That’s basically it, except for one thing. Originally in Picaclick, if you got any score below your high score it told you so and gave you some unhappy music. In Funclick, they replaced the unhappy music with the title screen music, presumably to make the game more “fun.”

There’s also some NiceCode games, and some hacks. Some of the hacks are kinda weird. Here’s some of them.

First off is Egg It.

Egg It is a hack of Pac-Man where you are a red turtle that goes around the screen laying eggs. The ghosts have been replaced with something, too. You win the round when all of the maze is filled up with eggs.

Yeah, that’s pretty weird. Moving on.

The next game is Break Out.

But no, this isn’t actually Breakout. It’s a hack of Mappy. They changed all the graphics and the most of the music.

Other than that, everything seems to be the same.

On to the next hack, Down Deep.

It’s a hack of Dig Dug. All the graphics and music seem to be changed. The theme when you start the game is replaced with the Galaga theme song, so maybe the other music is stolen, too.

There’s also some hacks of Donkey Kong. The first one is called “What’s Up.”

They’ve changed a lot of the music and graphics, and it starts on level 2.

There’s a lot more, but right now it’s 8:40 PM so I’ll end this post and write about the other games in future posts.

That’s it for now, guys. I’ll write more later in Part 2.

Oh, also! I’ve bought a player 2 controller from the same seller, but it hasn’t come in the mail yet. I’ll write about it when it does.